A typical wireless communication system includes base stations which communicate with user equipments (UEs). Each base station has an associated operational area where it communicates with UEs which are in its operational area. In some communication systems, such as code division multiple access (CDMA), multiple communications are sent over the same frequency spectrum. These communications are typically differentiated by their codes.
Since multiple communications may be sent in the same frequency spectrum and at the same time, a receiver in such a system must distinguish between the multiple communications. One approach to detecting such signals is matched filtering. In matched filtering, a communication sent with a single code is detected. Other communications are treated as interference. To detect multiple codes, a respective number of matched filters are used. These signal detectors have a low complexity, but can suffer from multiple access interference (MAI) and inter-symbol interference (ISI).
Other signal detectors attempt to cancel the interference from other users and the ISI, such as parallel interference cancellers (PICs) and successive interference cancellers (SICs). These receivers tend to have better performance at the cost of increased complexity. Other signal detectors detect multiple communications jointly, which is referred to as joint detection. Some joint detectors use Cholesky decomposition to perform a minimum mean square error (MMSE) detection and zero-forcing block equalizers (ZF-BLEs). These detectors tend to have improved performance but high complexities.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have alternate approaches to multi-user detection.